Oval worktops
The kitchens we meet in Oval
Stone worktop supply and fitting in Oval is decided by the room long before anyone opens a colour chart. Terraces around the ground have been split into flats more often than not, so the kitchen typically sits in a rear room with a 2.6m run and a return, sometimes opened into the living space with a breakfast bar. Whole houses take a modest rear extension rather than a full-width rebuild because gardens are short. Once the template is taken the figure stops moving. Everything before that is an estimate and is described as one.
Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. Thickness is a quieter decision than colour and shows more, because twenty millimetres reads lean and thirty reads substantial, and one costs more than the other in the same stone. Speckle hides a working kitchen; a flat dark gloss advertises one.
Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. The alcoves either side of a breast break the run into short pieces, and short pieces are exactly where buying a full slab outright starts to beat buying stone by the metre. A galley nests efficiently and frees money for better stone.
What the kitchens here mostly sit in is Victorian terrace, Georgian terrace, Edwardian mansion flat and Postwar estate block. They fail in different places, which is why the survey looks at different things.
